the recipe box

your presence still lingers here

She is immortal, my mother, her spirit infusing our old family farmhouse like a sea breeze in July—on the walls of her studio, fading watercolors of lady slippers and lupine; in the green gingham kitchen curtains she stitched forty thousand Aprils ago; in musty stacks of cookbooks and food-stained recipe cards, themselves microessays; on the keys of her ancient typewriter collection and the tiny piano’s yellowed ivory. And upstairs in her empty bedroom overlooking the cove where we used to swim, silver strands still cling to her grandmère’s sterling hairbrush on the antique bureau—tarnished memories of three lifetimes.

from mom’s sketchbook